fragile little flame

The hospital staff finally let Det. Kate Bantam have her pants back; the whole smock look made her feel like a midwife, and it’s a relief to shimmy into something like normal clothes. Her various bandages feel stiff and crinkly underneath her emergency back-of-the-car dress shirt, and as she checks herself out in the reflections in the elevator panels, she supposes she should feel pretty lucky. Ellen catches her straightening out her shirttails in the mirrored surface, and for a moment Kate thinks she’ll make a joke, some kind of quip about human vanity and the inevitable heat-death of the universe. She doesn’t, though, which might be a testimony to whatever painkillers they’ve got her on.

Det. Ellen Smalls got shanked two times with garden shears, putting to rest the Riding Mower Bandit case, and she took both times like a champion. If she’d been a foot taller and a foot wider, maybe he’d have gotten something important. But Kate still feels it, how near she’d come to losing her, and how close she’d come to having it be her fault, letting her tear off like that and having to go in after. She’d have hated hearing it told that way – some part of her is going to be pissed that Kate followed after her at all – but they’re a team. They’re collaborators. What good is only one of them? Waking up in the hospital and not having her right there had been like losing a limb – the gut-twisting fear that she’d be gone for good, giving way to an uncertainty of what she’d even be like when she did wake up. She’d put so much of herself in that case, heart and soul; her particular combination of grunt work and gut instinct had paid off and she got hurt for it. They’re heroes now, but at a price.

Ellen’s got one arm in a pale green sling and a wheelchair where her legs don’t quite reach the footrests. Kate wheels her out through the lobby to the parking lot so they can share a smoke and look for better cell reception. The night’s a warm one, with crickets singing, and the vault of heaven is high.

Smalls clears her throat significantly once the two of them clear the curb and are rolling on asphalt. “You’ve got the goods?”

“Sure do, partner.” She hands her a pack of American Spirits in the light blue box, what’s always been their brand – Ellen palms the box one-handed with a “thanks, I guess,” and puts one between her lips to light it before passing it back. Kate takes a long first pull on the cigarette, and contemplates the indirect touch of her partner’s mouth.

“So they caught the guy, huh? After I went down, he didn’t get away?”

“Nope, but he didn’t come easy. They’ve got him in lock-up right now, and he’s exactly like you said he’d be.” (White male, 35 to 40 years of age, above average height, pathological hostility toward outdoor power equipment and petite women. That ugly lug had fit her profile to a T, right down to the tattoos she’d had added in pen to the police sketch, though the bubble-letter alphabet drawn on the back of it turned out to be a dead end.) “You aced this one, Smalls. You were dead right all along, and now the whole station knows it.”

“I won’t lie, it feels pretty good, Bantam. But it took me long enough.”

Kate holds the cigarette up to Ellen’s lips; her partner takes a drag before she takes it up between her fingers, and leans back to look at her in the process. Kate feels her heart lurch. She looks so worn-out, and so herself; the shadows under her eyes have become a permanent installation there over the past months and she looks paradoxically young as a result. The too-big hospital gown doesn’t help.

Kate thinks of how long they’ve been doing this, how long it’s taken them to solve all of one case, what that’s meant. It means whole universes.

Ellen thumps her free hand on the armrest of her wheelchair, sending the first flakes of ash scattering. “Get me out of this thing, won’t you? Unless you’re going to let me do a wheelie.”

Bantam hoists her up in her arms, appreciating the solidity of her – that she’s here, that she’s hurt but not bad. Ellen grips on to her tightly, and the first few steps are stumbling, bare feet on parking lot pavement. She can feel the muscles of her arms tremble taut against her shoulder, can smell sweat and and latex and a little blood.

Ellen lifts her head, draggled ponytail brushing Kate’s shoulder. “Look at that sky.

“Yeah? I’m looking.”

“You ever been way out in the sticks, at night? A woman can be alone with her thoughts out there. No city lights, just headlights, and stars. I used to look up there and see just a bunch of balls of gas, burning billions of miles away, you know – they’re so big and goddamn far away, and we’re so little. Now just I see… fireflies. A whole bunch of fireflies, stuck up on that… bluish black thing.”

She shuts her eyes. Ellen’s jaw is tight, her face deeply thoughtful in the naked white light of the streetlamps. Like a statue, like a skull. Kate scrutinizes her.

“Smalls, what did I tell you about quoting The Lion King?”

There’s a beat, a slight and familiar motion of the head.

“…not to?”

“Right. Get it together, detective, shit.”

They walk a while longer in nonchalant silence, Ellen smoking and fumbling with her scraggly ponytail where it’s starting to come loose. Kate thumbs at her phone in a noncommittal kind of way until Ellen speaks up again.

“How long are they gonna detain you for, Bantam?”

“I’m free to go, soon as I sign some papers. Doctor says you’ll probably be set to walk out of here by tomorrow afternoon. You thinkin’ about making a break for it?”

“Yeah,” she says, in a breath of smoke, “yeah.”

“Sounds good to me, detective.”

Ellen looks at her appraisingly; her eyes are dark and deep.

“Take me back to your place this time. Anything back at mine, I don’t need any more.”

They’re on the open road for about 15 minutes with the windows down and the wheelchair in the back seat before Ellen remembers she’ll probably need a toothbrush. And her eczema medication. And underwear.

*

All of these things end up on Kate’s bedside table in a neat pile, right between her badge and her alarm clock. She’d always had an image of Ellen Smalls as some kind of half-feral mountain woman, but a dozen pairs of carefully laundered and folded briefs in primary colors with white piping suggest she possesses some subterranean sense of whimsy. Kate’s designer shoebox of an apartment isn’t all that big, and the bedroom is more like an alcove, but it’ll suit them both fine, and it won’t be the first time she’s stayed the night sleeping two to a bed.

Ellen takes a shower while Kate rifles through the medicine cabinet; afterward she helps change her dressings, an affair in which small hands come in handy. It’s great to get it over and done with, but they take their time with the process; Ellen can’t do too much lifting, and was stiff to start with before she took down a 250-pound man with only yardwork supplies and a badge, so Kate pulls up her ribbed undershirt for her with careful hands. She makes a catalogue of bruises; from the looks of it, they’re lucky she didn’t break a rib. There’s a bad one that wraps around to her shoulder blade, already starting to turn funny colors. Ellen twists where she sits on the bathtub’s edge for Kate to take a look at it.

“Shit,” she says, half-admiring.

Ellen’s eyes are pinched shut and still manage to look highly skeptical. “Yeah, whatever.”

“It’s shaped just like a map of Michigan.”

“Yeah, well, I’m Canadian.”

Ellen’s fingers mark out the distances between her own scrapes; her kisses taste like ash and pills and they are good.

They’re both in too rough of a shape to get up to much once they hit the hay, but it turns out it doesn’t need all that much core strength or two free hands to fingerbang Bantam into oblivion. Smalls makes her promise to return the favor while looking attractively winded, propped up on a pillow with nothing on but neon yellow underpants and a sling; Kate swears on her badge that she will, and they’re in agreement.

When Kate comes back from brushing her teeth she crawls in beside her, and it’s just the two of them on that broad empty futon, under the covers and not minding the heat. Two snugly-fitting pieces, adrift; whether they’re asleep or awake is hard to tell, there in the dark in a companionable sprawl of dog-tired limbs. She’s almost asleep, face plastered to Smalls’ perfect chest, when she feels her draw a ragged breath and shift a little beneath her.

“Kate?” Her voice is drowsy yet exquisitely strained.

“Yeah?”

“You’re lying on my wound there, friend.”

Kate apologizes and rolls off her as gently as possible. In the dark, they make a well-matched pair.